1st Edition

Hegemony, Security Infrastructures and the Politics of Crime Everyday Experiences in South Africa

By Gideon van Riet Copyright 2022
224 Pages 11 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

224 Pages 11 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

224 Pages 11 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book examines the politics of crime and the response to it in Potchefstroom, a small settler colonial city in South Africa. It draws on the city’s everyday practices and experiences to offer local bottom-up insights into security beyond the state. The book provides a comprehensive understanding of security beyond the state and how security workers and residents experience and perceive... Read more

Introduction: Crime, Security and Politics  Part 1: The Reopened Frontier and the Fortified Laager  1. Biopolitics and the Reopened Frontier  2. The Laager as a Collective Security Infrastructure  3. Infamous Spaces and the Constitutive Outside  Part 2: The Echo Chamber Effect  4. The Community Policing Forum: The Talk Shop and the Circulator of Ideas  5. Trauma, Debate and the Death Drive: Discursive Entanglements of Crime Reporting in the Potchefstroom Herald  6. Private Security Companies and Securitisation  Part 3: Everyday Practices  7. Private Security Operatives: The Typical and the Stereotypical  8. Surveillance in the Suburbs: The Pilot Project in Oewersig  9. The Cachet Park City Improvement District  Concluding Analysis: Crime, Radical and Plural Democracy and Strategies of Construction

Biography

Gideon van Riet is a senior lecturer in political studies at North-West University in South Africa. His research focusses on security as it pertains to disasters and crime. Gideon’s first monograph, The institutionalisation of disaster risk reduction: South Africa and neoliberal governmentality, was published by Routledge in 2017.